Anneke Jantz Bogardus was a Norwegian-born woman of modest means who inherited 62 acres on the island of Manhattan from her Dutch husband. It made her a widow of incalculable wealth in 17th-century New Netherland and the central figure in a classic rags-to-riches story that underscored the opportunities of the New World.

Their humble lives were also marked by high drama. A disputed land deed that gave the acreage to Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, near today’s World Trade Center, became a textbook legal case tied up in the state’s courts for seven generations of Bogarduses across two centuries.

Anneke was one of the first and most famous women to settle in Dutch Colonial Albany. In 1623, when she was 18, she married a 21-year-old Norwegian seaman, Roelof Janszen. Neither could read or write and they indicated their signatures with special marks, which led to variations on the spellings of their names.

The young newlyweds were risk-takers and they took a chance as colonists for Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, a wealthy Amsterdam jewelry merchant and patroon who established the patroonship of Rensselaerswyck, a vast land holding that encompassed all of present-day Albany and Rensselaer counties.

The couple and their two children arrived at Fort Orange in what is now downtown Albany on May 24, 1630, according to local records. Roelof was paid $72 a year as a farmer along the Hudson River near Normanskill Creek and he was appointed a schepen, or alderman. Anneke had two more children and the family interacted daily with local Native Americans with whom they traded. Incidentally, their daughter, Sara, later became the translator of New Netherland director-general Peter Stuyvesant in negotiations with local tribes.

In 1634, after the family paid off its contract to the patroon, they sought the bright lights of the big city and moved to Manhattan — “The Island at the Center of the World” in author Russell Shorto’s memorable term — and worked on a Dutch West India Company bouwerie, the Dutch word for farm. That section of Manhattan became known as “The Bowery.”

The industrious Roelof, who fathered six children with Anneke, was given a grant in 1636 for a 62-acre farm of his own near today’s World Trade Center. The following year, he built a small house on the farm and his mother-in-law, the colony’s midwife, lived with them. Roelof died suddenly in 1637 at age 35 and Anneke struggled financially as a widow, while the company refused to pay her 217 guilders she claimed her late husband was owed.

Anneke married again, in 1638, to the well-educated Domine Everardus Bogardus, who became minister of the Dutch Church on the lower tip of Manhattan. They lived on his wife’s farm, which became known as “Domine’s Bouwerie.” The couple had four sons together and they clashed frequently with the colony’s leaders on civic and legal matters, including the unpaid 217 guilders. When Anneke was widowed a second time at age 42, she had nine children to support and was cash-poor and land-rich with two farms — the second was 82 acres on Long Island from Bogardus.

Anneke moved back to Albany, then known as Beverwyck, and in 1652 she received a patent for a lot and a house near today’s State and James streets downtown. As her children married and moved out, she gave each a wedding present of a bed and a milk cow. Her eccentricities and combativeness were accentuated and she was nicknamed “the vulture.” Lore had it that she once hiked her skirts in a mooning retaliatory move against some heckling, pipe-smoking burghers she walked past. The incident wound up in court, a dispute that Anneke won by successfully arguing she had only been trying to keep the hem of her skirt out of the muddy lane.

Anneke died in 1663 after living for 16 years in Albany. Her will stipulated that her estate, including the 62-acre farm in The Bowery, be divided equally among her seven surviving children. Her kids sold her Albany house that year to Dirk Wessels Ten Broeck for 1,000 guilders. The 62 acres allegedly was sold in 1671 by her heirs for “a valuable consideration,” but the land was confiscated and turned over to the British crown after the English turned out the Dutch. The Brits leased the land to Trinity Church in 1697 for 60 bushels of wheat. In 1705, Queen Anne granted the land to the church.

By 1800, after swampy areas had been drained and commercial buildings were erected on it, the farm was considered the most valuable land in America. Today, it is some of the priciest real estate in the world and is worth billions.

Anneke’s funeral was held at Albany’s Old Church, built by her son, Jan, at the intersection of State Street and Broadway, and she was buried in the church cemetery. Her remains were moved to Albany Rural Cemetery in the mid-1800s, a common practice, and re-interred in the Dudley family plot in Section 61, Lot 1, along Middle Ridge Road, a gesture of respect from matriarch Blandina Dudley. The legal battle over the 62-acre Manhattan farm by Anneke’s descendants raged on in sometimes comical ways. Anneke’s great-grandson, Cornelius Bogardus, began squatting in a house on the farm in the 1850s and Trinity Church officials tried to evict him. He fought back with fire, a shotgun with bird shot, and buckets of scalding water dumped from a window. He was eventually ousted, but the family’s increasingly desperate lawsuit carried on well into the 1900s, even after the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, dismissed it in 1881.

The case of Anneke Jantz Bogardus and her 62 acres of prime Manhattan lives on in dozens of scholarly articles and chapters in legal textbooks that attempt to deconstruct the thorny arguments.